You're too slow!

You pull your arm up just a bit too slow, and swing the shield through empty air as the bolt breeches your guard and slams right into your chest. Houf! All the wind is knocked out of you as the blunt bolt falls to the ground in front of you, and you wheeze as you fall to one knee.

Across the pool, Jace knocks another bolt into the crossbow. "You alright?" He shouts across to you, keeping the crossbow pointed down for now.

You try to call out back to him that you are, but you're still too winded so all that comes out is a little puff of air. Oh, fooey. This totally means that you lost, doesn't it? That all happened so fast! You barely had time to do anything. Jace stows his crossbow and jogs around the pool and over to you.

"Hey, that was a nice move at the start, shooting off quickly to get behind cover." Jace says. He looks pretty happy right now, even though you're feeling a little disappointed. He's not even acting all victory-happy, just friendly-happy, so it's actually making you feel a bit better as you stand back up straight.

"Um.... and good shooting!" You reply. Guess you should put the bullets from your pepperbox back into your pocket now, huh? As you fiddle around with that, you continue. "If it was real bullets and crossbow bolts, I'd be super duper dead."

Jace starts unstrapping his small amount of armour. "Good for learning the basics, I guess. We'll probably be going more in depth later."

Yeah, that's right! You might be disappointed a bit, but you're not disheartened. Now you know that you should work on your Speed to use your shield better (especially since you don't have much armour on your body), and you have a basic idea of how combat's gonna work with your equipment, and when you go again and beat Jace next time, you'll know that you've gotten better. This is one loss and three wins! Not a bad way to spend a bit of Free Time, and it was fun hanging out with Jace too. Four wins.